The big news of this summer was that Edicy will become Voog, a vastly updated and improved successor of the current version. Many of you have already switched, others will follow suit in the autumn — after we've polished the user experience and brought Voog out of beta.

Another important announcement is that we've switched to a faster and more reliable network service provider. Therefore we've also had to change the IP-addresses of our servers. Think of them as the postal codes of the server world.

We've changed everything below Edicy — the servers are new and more powerful, the system architecture on them is more optimized and there are more people taking care of the tech stuff — and your peace of mind. As the next and final step of this transistion, you'll soon be switched to Voog, the new version of Edicy.

Those of you who have imported (pointed) an external domain name to your website on Edicy, have to point it to the new IP-address: 85.222.234.11. The change has to be made at your nameservice provider or domain name registrar.

Old settings will cease to work sometime after 01. December 2014, so please make the change before this date. If you do not know where you can change your domain settings, please contact support@edicy.com and we'll sort it out.

We’ve just added a friendly little feature to Edicy which makes it very easy to send invites friends, colleagues and even distant relatives. If your friend clicks on your invite and signs up to one of our paid plans, they get a 50% discount and we give you 6 months of our premium service for free. The free months will be added to your account automatically.

If you don’t use our premium service yet, this lets you use your own domain, create more sub pages and use our other pro features.

You can call it just a promotion, or a way to thank our users that recommend Edicy to others. But it’s also a bit of a mission – this way we can make sure that more websites created in the coming months will be beautiful, easy to use and optimized for mobile. And who wouldn’t want that?

One of the most requested features, blog post tags are now available on every website in Edicy. With tags you can systematize your posts, group similar ones under one unifying marker — a tag.

For example, mark blog posts about your recent design discoveries with 'design' and 'inspiration' tags or use 'design' and 'people' tags if your post is about your favorite designers.

If you have a website with custom design, tags aren't automatically opened up for you as we have no authority to change your template. But with your permission, we can update your site in a blink of an eye. Just drop us a line at support@edicy.com.

Have you ever worried that one of your sub contractors working on your site will accidentally change subscription or site design without your approval? Well, worry no more. We've just introduced editor and site owner roles in Edicy.

Editors can do only things that Edicy is intended to do — edit site content and nothing more. They do not have an option to manage subscriptions or domains. This means that they also won't receive renewal notifications from us — which, in turn, is gentle on their inboxes.

From now on, every person added to your site will be in editor role by default. To change one's role, just click on "Edit" link next to the person's card in the people screen and click on "Make account owner" link on the right-hand side of person's edit screen.

Today, we made it possible to add titles to the photos in galleries. Along with this oft-requested change we rolled out several improvements to picture and file management.

Adding or editing photo titles follows the same approach as everything else in Edicy — you can edit everything on spot, right where your site visitors will see it. To add (or change) title under a photo, just click on it in the gallery. You'll see the photo in large size along with a placeholder saying "Title goes here". Type title in, save it and you are done. Site visitors will now see the new title when viewing the pic in full size.

You might also notice that file panel is much faster than before. We've rebuilt most of it internally to increase speed, stability and ease of use. We've ditched the old clumsy file filter that did not work well when you had lot of files. It is replaced with simple search box that lets you find any of your files in Edicy by name.

This deserves a bit longer introduction. Our engineer Oliver is an avid photographer and was longing for a simpler method to feature his photos on Edicy.

Therefore we extended our existing blog tool for this completely new purpose. Each blog post has a cover image with post title on top of it. Each post can contain any number of photos or photo galleries in it.

You can also have posts that don't have cover images — or any photo at all. In that case photo is substituted with a beautiful white heading on a black background rectangle.

From the early days of Edicy, Reykjavik has been the most minimalistic design we've had. Since web has evolved so much since we introduced it, it looked a bit dull and outdated. Therefore Paavel made a complete redesign to it. Still the simplest theme, but with a cool and fresh look.

Bold statements, big letters, no need for pictures if you don't need 'em.

Actually we have one more. Pripyat. Named after the sad little Ukrainian city that was closed down after Chernobyl catastrophe, this barren design is for advanced users only. It's a starting point for the growing band of Edicy developers who build their customer websites on Edicy. It's a design without any style at all. The basic html code and tempalte syntax is there, but no style at all. None. Times New Roman.

What kind of design are you missing? Let us know so we can consider it when designing the next one.

Those more tech-savvy of you can now take full control of the domains in Edicy. There's a complete DNS settings section for every domain you buy at Edicy. Manually setting up emails at Google or your local hosting company is therefore really simple — if you know what DNS, IP and MX stand for, that is.

For the rest of us Edicy continues doing everything automatically, as always. Even better — we've improved the domain buying experience considerably. Searching among all the 25 name endings on sale here like yourname.com, .net, .fr, .it, .pl etc is many times faster now.

We've just launched a major update to our product catalogue feature. Since it has been useful only to bigger and more complex sites, this update brings simple-to-use catalogs closer to anyone using Edicy.

Our product catalogue tool lets you define custom objects models. Models have fields that site editor can fill to create objects based on these object definitions. These objects can be listed on site or displayed separately on dedicated pages.

This is how the product catalogue admin views look like in Edicy.

So it is more than just product catalogues. It lets you create objects for almost any purpose, basically. Therefore we call it “Catalogue”, which is generic enough. A few examples you can use the catalogue for:

List products with images, descriptions, prices

Create page with your company employees, each having their name, photo, contact information listed.

Set up job board with available job positions and their descriptions on your company.

In order to build up catalogue on site, you need three things:

Define object model that is a "template" to all objects in catalogue. Model declares the fields that each object in catalogue has. Examples of object model would be "Product", "Employee", "Job offer", each having their respective field sets. This is what we launched with this week's update.

Create pages where objects will be displayed. At the moment every object in catalogue needs a page where it belongs to, otherwise it cannot be seen by your site visitors. This is the part that is a work-in-progress in Edicy. In order to create these pages you need to customize your site design. We will roll out support for catalogues in stock designs in the near-future.

Add objects to these pages with selected object types. This means creating objects with the fields defined on their respective models. Object editor also got a big overhaul this week.

Please note that our product catalog feature is not a "one size fits all"-shoe solution by design in itself. Our approach aims to target these most generic usage scenarios. If catalog falls short on anything it is always possible to make Edicy work together with custom systems.

It is also tempting to reveal that new product catalogue also has a public API in private testing you can later use to modify objects outside Edicy user interface. More on that soon!

A number of European web agencies and freelancers use Edicy for building advanced customer websites with unique designs. Making life easier for developers and designers has therefore been our main goal during the last few months.

We have completely redesigned and rewritten the single most important tool for developers in Edicy, the template code editor, for speedier and more comfortable user experience.

Interface layout

Code editor is now redesigned as a full screen in-browser text editor. It is designed to be as unobtrusive as possible allowing you to focus better on the code and files you're working with. The big administration toolbar is replaced with new minified one to gain coding space. To go even further even the mini-toolbar can be completely hidden with a single click on dotted border.

Help and documentation

Edicy developers help is now rewritten and accessible directly from inside code editor. Writing templates in Edicy for newcomers is thus a lot easier. For experienced users it reduces the need for Googling the web every time you need to check some property or tag. We've added, and continue to add, useful real life examples to the help's examples section.

Editing code

For editing and syntax highlighting we use high performance Ace editor. It gives a bleeding-edge code editor inside browser window, focusing strongly on pleasant user experience. In addition Ace editor implements many of the keyboard shortcuts and functions you may have accustomed to in your current text editor.

We have added additional keyboard shortcuts for common tasks making your life a lot easier:

Drag, drop

Inserting files and components into your code is now just a matter of dragging and dropping the desired item from the list or tabs into your code. It will be automatically inserted at caret position using appropriate syntax and path. Also managing images and getting their dimensions is now a lot easier via image gallery and previewing options.

The new code editor is an appreciation to you developers and designers out there using Edicy. We hope it will leave a pleasant touch to your everyday chores.

Next up — API

We are now building the Edicy public API, finally :) It will include not only template management but also database access to push data from external apps to the product catalogues and other lightweight databases on your Edicy website.

Let us know in the comments if you want to be among the first API testers in the coming months. Also, feedback on the code editor is very much welcome!

If you manage multiple sites in Edicy, then in order to jump from one site to another, you always had to switch into editing mode where the site switcher is. From now on, site switcher can also be found in full admin-screens. Just click on "My Sites" icon in Settings panel and a list of other sites slide out waiting for you to pick one.

Along with this small release we also improved the invoices screen to give better overview of what you have paid us for. And last but not least, we made admin views slightly lighter to make them more readable.